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“The new oversized print-only issue of Arthur Magazine is even more gorgeous and satisfying than expected. Like a Sunday supplement for heads.” — Jesse Jarnow, author of Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock

“A coffee-table newspaper, printed on 16 immense pages of newsprint with minimal ads, and almost every inch covered with words or pictures… The cover, a gigantic piece by surreal comics artist Rick Veitch, is gorgeous, and the crispness and clarity of the print is perhaps the best I’ve seen in a newspaper. Everything in the new [issue] is worth absorbing… Opening the mammoth pages of the new Arthur feels much like unfolding a road map, one that points to strange, unfamiliar worlds.”
— Ned Lannamann, The Portland Mercury

Come celebrate the release of Arthur’s first new issue in four years at a free party TONIGHT Thursday, January 3, 2013 at Floating World Comics, Arthur’s new co-publisher.

We’ll have original comic art on display from contributors Rick Veitch and Gabby Schulz. Floating World head honcho/Arthur co-publisher Jason Leivian will be there, and Arthur Art Director Yasmin Khan is rumored to be stopping by. Plus: Betel nuts, and other surprises.

“The new oversized print-only issue of Arthur Magazine is even more gorgeous and satisfying than expected. Like a Sunday supplement for heads.” — Jesse Jarnow, author of Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock

“A coffee-table newspaper, printed on 16 immense pages of newsprint with minimal ads, and almost every inch covered with words or pictures… The cover, a gigantic piece by surreal comics artist Rick Veitch, is gorgeous, and the crispness and clarity of the print is perhaps the best I’ve seen in a newspaper. Everything in the new [issue] is worth absorbing… Opening the mammoth pages of the new Arthur feels much like unfolding a road map, one that points to strange, unfamiliar worlds.” — Ned Lannamann, The Portland Mercury

When the aughties weren’t horrifying, they were tough. Wars raged, SARS spiked, economies crumbled and America decided that its pop singers would be elected to fame via reality television, which, while pseudo-democratic, remains humiliating for all parties involved.

We needed a friend. Someone who could tell a weird joke, hip us to unheard music, teach us how to forage for food in the wild, or give us crash courses in magic. We needed Arthur.

A decade ago, free stacks of the counterculture magazine began materializing at coffee shops, bookstores, nightclubs and galleries across the country. These unsuspecting little newspapers were packed with fantastic reads — articles for, by and/or about rockers, radicals, astrologists, herbalists, poets, punks, believers, debunkers, cooks, comedians, cartoonists and Dolly Parton. But in 2008, as the great recession sent so many indie publications into death spasms, the magazine went kaput.

Four years later, Arthur has risen. “It’s good to be alive again, doing something that we love,” writes editor and co-publisher Jay Babcock in the magazine’s new issue, which features a definitive interview with late outsider guitarist Jack Rose and an almost hallucinogenic appreciation of Waylon Jennings’s finest album, “Dreaming My Dreams,” by Stewart Voegtlin.

And then there’s the biggest surprise: You can actually hold this thing — a beautiful, 16-page broadsheet — in your hands…